Potted film reviews by Gary Anthony Cross

August 24, 2016

Predator 2 (1990)

The Predator returns to stalk supercop Danny Glover on the streets of a suburban war zone while a federal special ops team try to track down and capture the creature.

Relocating the predator story to a humid city environment in the middle of a gang war was actually a pretty strong idea, but the execution falls far short of the promising concept. Much of the first half of the film is a hang over from trashy 1980’s cop films, full of posturing stereotypes who come across as little more than foul-mouthed, trigger happy thugs because it lacks the tongue in cheek humour of the first film. The supporting cast are – without exception – awful, and the cinematography tacky and cheap looking. Add some poor production design and very dated effects and we have a typical sequel in that a great idea is dragged down to the level of a straight to DVD release. Thankfully it’s not a complete waste of time; it starts reasonably well and the sequence where they try to capture the predator is decent, although it’s transparently a hugely inferior rip off of the first encounter scene in Aliens. The predator is still a very cool creation and seeing a Geiger alien skull in their ship probably caused every sci-fi nerd who saw it to spontaneously ejaculate.

But the fact is that the much maligned Alien Versus Predator films are both rather better than this rather shoddy outing and probably saved the Predator franchise from a similar fate to that of Starship Troopers.